After a trial period brewing with a 400L experimental setup in an outbuilding we moved into our site at Oundle Wharf in September 2012 with a brand new 2500L brewery from DME in Canada. The new site allowed us to open our Brewery Shop and we quickly began to supply our local area with take-away packaged beer as well as attracting a small following of Friday night after work drinkers.
Since then we have steadily expanded our reach and our range and we have gone from strength to strength. Our aim for the range is to offer a steady supply of new and interesting beers. Many of these are one-offs or collaborations which allow us to maintain our own interest along with our customers. Some of the one-off brews are too popular to only produce once and so our offering has expanded and we have to work quite hard to contain the variety of beers to a manageable number without disappointing too many customers.
We have been aiming for all of our beers to be gluten free since the end of 2015, about the same time we first started canning Big Bang Theory and Release the Chimps. Whilst in no way wanting to market ourselves as a gluten free brewery we have been surprised at the interest in the products from the GF community and we hope that more breweries will follow suit.
Although it can be quite hard work for our small team we like to get out and about and meet and talk to our customers as much as possible. We have run a brewery bar at various festivals and always find the experience of introducing new beers and gaining immediate feedback to be both enjoyable and valuable. Additionally we have attended numerous tap takeovers and meet-the-brewer events, with one notable event in Cambridge seeing 15 different NVB beers on the bar. At another event in London we sold 800L of a single beer in an evening of a beer brewed specially for one of our customers.